


As If They Knew

by flashindie



Category: Good Girls (TV)
Genre: F/M, Fake/Pretend Relationship
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-24
Updated: 2019-02-24
Packaged: 2019-11-05 04:51:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,504
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17912345
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flashindie/pseuds/flashindie
Summary: Beth comes up with a solution to get Agent Turner off their backsor the one where Beth and Rio fake date by getting real married.





	As If They Knew

**Author's Note:**

> Hahahaha, I know I should be finishing the last few chapters of Like an Unsung Chorus, but this idea wouldn't let me gooo.

“I want you to think of it as a business proposition, nothing more, nothing less,” she says, legs crossed, leaning forwards across the bar. “I mean, it’ll benefit both of us. It’ll _protect_ both of us.” 

For maybe the first time since she met the guy, Rio takes the opportunity to lean _away_ from her, not towards her, rocking back on his barstool in an apparent effort to take in as much of her as possible. As he does it, Beth sits a little taller, a little straighter, squaring her shoulders. She’s glad she decided on a dress. She thinks he’s partial to dresses. She’s seen the way his eyes dip to the curves of them, the hems. Not that they don’t exactly when she’s in jeans and a blouse, but still. 

She thinks he’s partial to a dress.

And this one is _so_ sweet. New even! Bought for the occasion. Something that hugs her in the right places, but that stands out – a neat, blue and white stripe, light enough to evade the cloyingness of nautical style. It does a good job too of making the fairness of her skin, the brightness of her eyes, just about pop. 

Rio looks good too, even though she’s sure he put in a fraction of the effort. He’s in a maroon shirt, buttoned to the collar, as always, a pair of tight jeans that _actually_ make him look like he has half an ass (so it’s not his best feature. So she’s noticed.) and his five o’clock shadow is flirting with being a full beard. 

Still. 

He looks good. 

“Ain’t you married already?” he asks her, eyebrows halfway up his forehead and Beth blushes, clears her throat, fidgets a little on the spot. 

“Divorced, actually.” 

If it’s possible, his eyebrows travel even further up his head. 

“Since when?” 

And if she were honest, she’d say barely – after all, it’s only been three days since her and Dean sat down at the lawyers’ office and signed on that dotted line. There’s still work to be done too – around custody of the kids and asset division and the whole nasty mess of all the mortgages and Boland Motors and loans, not to mention the division of friends and families, favourite restaurants, birthdays and holidays and a million things Beth’s Mindful Mom workshops failed to prepare her for, but that’s beside the point, so she settles on:

“Since recently,” and Rio’s face does that thing where he rocks his jaw back and forth and his eyes focus so intently on her it’s like he can read her, clean and clear as a text on his iPhone. 

“Right, right,” he replies, diverting his gaze out across the bar, and Beth’s oddly relieved for the change in focus. 

It’s busy enough, albeit not exactly packed. A nice, neat, mingling crowd. It’s been one of Rio’s preferential spots to meet her in lately, and she thinks it might be due to the ebb and flow of the crowd, the chicly middle class, anonymous vibe to the joint, hipster enough that his throat tatts and his swagger very almost blend in, and Beth’s middle-aged mom look can be mistaken for any onsetting midlife crisis or desperate attempt to seem hip to new friends or kids older than her own. 

Speaking of, across the bar, a guy young enough to be her son stares blatantly at her chest, and right, she thinks. This is why she doesn’t wear things this low cut anymore. Rio had barely even glanced himself, at least not since she’d made her proposition, and man, maybe this is just another utterly humiliating waste of time. 

Beth rolls her shoulders, leaning back in her seat. 

“So?” she asks, and Rio shrugs, sliding up off his barstool.

“So, I gotta think about it,” he tells her, and Beth nods, reaching for her purse, but Rio’s tossing notes on the risen table between them before she can get any cash out herself. She turns to say thank you, but then he’s there beside her, running a hand up the exposed skin of her arm before he turns on his heel and leaves.

*

So it goes something like this:

Rio slides her his golden gun with all his talk of jungles and monarchies and Beth cries in a way she’ll be embarrassed by in the coming months, but in the end, she shoots Dean. Not to kill, never, ever, but in the leg – enough he’ll have to skip the elementary school’s daddy-daughter fun run. He’d yelled at her again, that’s what had done it. Dean, with his swollen face and his tight voice and his bafflement and maybe it was the guilt that did it, but she’s suddenly righteously angry all over again – about Amber, about the cancer, about twenty years with a man who didn’t seem to see the problem in lying to her – and her arm had swung and she’d pulled the trigger before she’d had time to think it through. 

It was almost worth it for the look on both their faces. 

So Rio had prowled up to her, pried the gun from her fingers and said, “Darlin’, you are full of surprises,” before he’d left, and Beth had taken Dean to the hospital, and been relieved and more than a little surprised when Dean had spun a story of a breaking and entering gone wrong instead of leading with the truth. 

(“I barely saw the guy,” Dean had told the officer, hands folded in his lap in the hospital bed, eyes never leaving Beth’s face. “He was so fast. I think he wore a mask. I’m just glad I could protect my wife.”

And right, Beth had thought, understanding her role. Dean was to be the hero, and he would salvage a hero’s reputation out of the mess, and Beth would be the bitch who divorces the man who saved her, but hey. At least she’ll get her divorce.) 

After that, she’d kind of figured it was over, all of it, and it was for a week, maybe two, as she’d tried to force her sprawling life back into the box it used to fit into, only then they were at the park, and Rio was sliding back beside them, giving her a gun of her own in a doughnut bag (the purchase made from Ruby’s new job, and there’s no way that that wasn’t deliberate) and an order for 200G. 

And so what, if maybe she felt the thrill all over again? So what if one job turns into four turns into seven turns into twelve? So what if Beth is more pleased than she can possibly admit to being back in business with the man she tried to put away? 

It’s not like the latter doesn’t taint all their interactions anyway. A weight to Rio’s look, to his tone, to his posturing that tells her he hasn’t forgotten. That he won’t trust her, that she’s proven that he can’t, and the distance that puts between them is at once a comfort and a type of threat that Beth can’t quite unravel. 

She’s not sure what would’ve come of it at all if Agent Turner hadn’t shown up at her house again, asking where her husband was, her kids, before sliding into a barstool and asking if she was _sure_ she hadn’t seen the man in that photograph again, his eyes and his tone leaving no real question at all. 

And so Beth had done the only thing that had made sense, and she’d told him maybe they had run into each other again, and maybe they’d found themselves intimate again – the backseat of his Cadillac this time, a Walmart parking lot – then maybe she’d brought him home. Maybe they’d seen each other again. 

“It’s casual,” she’d said in the moment. “My husband’s leaving me. I just need a little relief.” 

And Agent Turner had nodded, slid off the stool, and said, “I’m going to need you to come into the station again. I’d like this on record.” 

And Beth’s mind had gone into overdrive.

*

“So I did something,” Beth says, and Annie and Ruby both stop, drinks halfway to their lips. They look at each other, and Ruby lets out a shaky breath.

“Hives, Beth,” Ruby says. “Literal stress hives.” 

“You’re telling me,” Annie starts scratching dramatically at her arms, eyes closed, mouth twisted into a grimace. 

Beth rolls her eyes. She sets her drink down on the coffee table, and twists in her seat to better face them. And she tells them. She tells them about Agent Turner, about the old lie and the new one, then about her idea, and that last drop with Rio at the bar, and what, exactly, she’d said. 

There’s a few moments of complete and utter silence, and so Beth reaches back for her drink, nervously clears her throat before polishing off the last few mouthfuls, and then its Annie’s voice, breaking in the space between them. 

“You…proposed to gangfriend?” 

“I…” Beth fumbles for the phrase. She’d _rehearsed_ this, damnit. “I business proposed. I mean, I made a business proposal.”

“Beth, I’m pretty sure if you propose literal marriage to someone it’s actually just a regular proposal,” Annie says, reaching for her drink. 

“ _Business_ proposal,” Beth reiterates. At their disbelieving look, Beth sighs, shifts forwards in her seat. “Look, Agent Turner is so far up our collective asses at this point that we’re looking at time. Time away from our children, from Stan, from Greg. Time that we’re not going to get back, or bounce back from. But Rio - - you know, he got out of it last time. He escaped it, and if he and I are married, we can’t testify against each other. I think it’ll help him to trust us again, and if he does, then he’ll protect us.” 

“You,” Ruby says. “He’ll protect _you_.” 

“ _Us_ ,” Beth emphasises. “I told him it’s a part of the deal, and he understands that. It’ll put me in his pocket, but it’ll also put him in ours. We know too much for him to leave us as a loose end anyway if this whole thing does go down again, but if he and I are married, we’re – ”

Beth fumbles for the words, but it’s Annie who chips in. 

“Back in business. Real business.” 

“Right. We’re already business partners. This’ll just be another layer to that. Better than that. It’ll be some insurance.” 

Annie finishes her drink, and Ruby sighs. 

“Beth, you can’t honestly think this is a good idea. It’s one thing to run jobs for this man, but you’re talking about literally and _legally_ getting into bed with him. We don’t know anything about him except that he is _dangerous_. He’s had no issues pointing a gun at you before, and he’s certainly had no issues threatening us, intimidating us – you don’t know what else he’s capable of.” 

“I think I do,” Beth says quickly, surprised to find that she means it, and Ruby gives her a sort of sad, sort of desperate look that she really doesn’t want to think too much about. 

“Look,” she says instead. “It won’t mean anything. It’ll just be another piece of paper between us. It’s not like we haven’t had enough of those. Besides, he hasn’t even agreed to it anyway.” 

“Well, maybe he didn’t like the ring,” Ruby says dryly, and Beth just gives her a look before getting up to pour them all another drink.

*

“Since Carter turned twelve, his bedtime’s been ten-thirty,” Kenny tells her, a pout tugging at his round little face.

Beth is hovering over the sink, elbow deep in dish suds, her hair tied loosely back. 

“Well, that’s because Carter doesn’t have any little brothers or sisters who look up to him to be a good example.” 

Beth really thinks class mom’s should have conferences on these sorts of things. The thought of letting her kids stay up to almost when _she’s_ ready for bed make her want to crawl into a hole to get away from them. Sure, she loves her kids, but she might just love them most when they’re all tucked into bed, a tangle of little limbs and kitten snores on the floor above her while she drinks and watches crappy home renovation shows to turn her brain off. 

“It’s not fair.”

“Life’s not fair.” 

Kenny grumbles as he pushes off the counter and trudges across the living room. She hears, doesn’t see, his feet padding up the stairs to his bedroom, and she almost collapses against the sink in relief. 

Between the ever growing presence of the FBI in her life, the commitment of the jobs, helping Annie with her custody case, her own divorce, to say nothing of the whole mom thing, she’s pretty close to her breaking point. Or, not her breaking point. The point where she just slides to the floor and sleeps for three weeks maybe. 

She finishes off the last of the dinner dishes, stacking them up beside the sink and is debating whether to dry them and put them away, or leave them to air dry overnight when she hears footsteps across the living room floor. 

“Kenny,” she groans. “I swear, if you’re not in bed in the next ten seconds, you can forget about even your nine-thirty bedtime. You’ll be sharing waking hours with your five year old sister, how about that?” 

“Harsh, mama.” 

A scream catches in her throat as Beth spins quickly on the spot, back finding the kitchen sink, the water run off already soaking through the back of her blouse, her hands still foamy with dish soap. And it’s Rio, of course it’s Rio, standing in the entry way to her kitchen, hands buried deep in the pockets of his hoodie, a wry grin on his face. 

She wipes her hands on the belly of her shirt, leaving wet prints there, as she shakes her head. 

“You know I hate it when you do that?” 

He leans sideways, so his shoulder is pressed into the doorframe, his legs crossed beneath him, and he nods. 

“You scare too easy.” 

Beth scoffs. She doesn’t think she scares easy at all, but she’s jumpy enough at the moment, particularly around him. 

“Been thinkin’ about your proposal.” 

“Proposition,” Beth corrects, and it’s only after she’s said it, from the look on his face, that she hears the lewdness in the word. She blushes to the roots of her hair, clears her throat and quickly continues. “Well?” 

“I think I need more information.” 

She blinks in surprise, head back, tries to catch any insinuation in Rio’s words, but his face is carefully neutral. 

“In what way?” 

At the question, he pulls a hand of his pocket, gesturing between the two of them. 

“Tell me how you see it workin’.” 

“It’s not exactly a science,” she says, but sighs, pushing off the sink and striding towards the counter between them. She pushes her hands out, until she’s leaning heavily there. “Agent Turner’s been around again. He wants me to come in. He wants me to talk about you - - _us_. I bought us some time, telling him we’d been - -“ Oh god, she wishes she could stop blushing when she talks about this with him. She has four children, it’s not like he doesn’t know she - - “Together. Again. A couple of times. He wants me to put it on record, and then I think he wants to use me against you. If we’re married, he can’t.”

“I get the idea,” Rio says. “That ain’t what I’m askin’.” 

And right, Beth thinks. Right. She clears her throat. 

“We go to the courthouse, this week some time preferably. Before I go in to visit Turner, I mean. And that’s it. We’re married. Turner’s on his ass for a little while.” 

“Where do we live?” 

“Excuse me?” Beth asks, and Rio arches an eyebrow at her, finally pushing off the doorframe and walking towards her. He stops at the other side of the counter, leaning bodily across it until there’s barely a foot between them. 

“I don’t know how you’ve done it before, darlin’, but typically married couples don’t live in different parts of town.” 

And right, Beth thinks. She drums her fingers on the counter, watching him, watching her. 

“So you move in here.” 

There go his eyebrows again. 

“I move in here?” 

“Yes,” Beth decides, ignoring the clamping in her belly. “Just until all this blows over. They’ll be watching us, right? I mean, they’re already watching us. You stay here long enough that it doesn’t raise any suspicions.” 

Rio tilts his head, and Beth hums, head going into overdrive, working on the solutions. This? This she can do. 

“We can make it work. So the FBI knows, but you don’t have to work out of here, you know? You go about your business, do whatever you want, but you come here at night. You stay over, or at least stay late enough that it’s not too suspicious. They obviously know enough to know the line of work you’re in, and suspect that we work together, so me not thinking anything of you going out late shouldn’t be a shock. And it’ll work here, you know. I can - - I can put Emma on the fold-out in Jane and Danny’s room, you can have her bed.” 

He laughs at that, head reeling back. 

“You want me to sleep in your little girl’s room?” 

“You had no problem putting your friend in there.” 

“He wasn’t exactly conscious.” 

Beth pauses, a spike of fear in her gut again. It’s not like he’s exactly alive now. Ruby’s words (“He’s _dangerous_ ”) echo again in her head, but she shakes them out. She can’t think like that, not now. This was her idea. This is - - 

“So it’s not a permanent solution,” she agrees. “But for right now? Right now, it’ll stop me having to go on the record about you, it’ll throw Turner off this lead, at least for a little while, and it’ll buy us some time. Plus we won’t have to meet in secret anymore. It’s not weird that a husband and wife go out together, or if you’re seeing Annie or Ruby, you’re being a good brother-in-law. A good guy to your wife’s friend and her family. It’ll explain things. It’ll make Turner’s feeling about us be true enough, but not in the way that he wants.”

She stops then, takes a shaky breath, watches him, watching her. He has such a way of looking, she thinks loosely. A focus that she hasn’t encountered outside of him, a careful, intense look that hits her in the chest and slips hot in her veins. His jaw rocks, and he leans back off the counter, putting distance between them again. 

“You know this will make it worse for you, not easier,” he tells her, and Beth nods. “You think they’re watching you now? What do you think happens when we’re a package deal?”

“In the short term, yes,” she says. “But I’m not playing a short game anymore, am I?” 

He laughs, but there’s not a lot behind it. 

“It’s an easy one to get into,” he agrees. “A lot harder to get out.” 

She wonders, briefly then, if he’s ever tried to. Something in the twist of his look tells her that he has. She tries not to dwell on it. 

“It doesn’t mean anything,” Beth tells him, echoing what she’d said to Annie and Ruby earlier in the night. “So we get married. It’s a piece of paper. But it’ll protect us both, like I said before. If we can’t testify against each other, they can’t use us against each other. We’ll be safer. I mean, not safe, I know that, but. Safer.” 

“Maybe with the FBI, but you know marrying me puts a target on your back? You can’t think I’m the only operation in Detroit. You seen too much for that.” 

And she’d thought about that, she had. Her breath catches, and not for the first time, she wonders if this is the stupidest thing she’s ever done. 

“I know,” she says. “And maybe I’ll regret this, I don’t know. What I know is that this, right now, this could save me and my sister and my best friend and my family, and the rest I’ll figure out. I always figure it out.”

He huffs out a little breath, looking up at her through thick, black lashes. 

“You do.” 

They just stand there then, staring at each other, and after a moment, Rio shakes his head, laughing softly to himself. 

“Book us in then, yeah?” 

“Yeah?” Beth asks, leaning forwards, heart in her throat. 

“Wednesday.” 

He pulls a stack of cash out of his pocket, counts it neatly and drops it onto the kitchen counter between them. 

“For the license,” he says. “And the rings.”

“Right,” Beth says breathlessly, heart hammering in her chest as Rio slinks out into the dark.


End file.
